Guild Wars 2

Here are a few observations about a game I once liked considerably, but now find tedious:

1. Black Lion Throttling – After selling a few items, I get a “sell error”. I’ve heard this was someone’s attempt to reduce “botting”. Computers are excellent at doing the tedious things over-and-over, so let’s just pretend a bot reaches its throttle point. What does the programmer do? He programs it to close the window, re-open the window, sell a single item, close the window, re-open the window, sell a single item, etc. Or he programs a delay.

Effect on botters? Slightly delayed gratification. Effect on all the other players in the game? Frustration and annoyance – not to mention an assumption by the ignorant that there are “sell errors” in the programming.

2. Champ farming – here we enjoy the law of unintended consequences. Does anyone know what you get when you pay someone to do something? You get a whole lot more of people doing that thing. Load up champs with a guaranteed prize, and people will find ways to farm them.

But let us also consider the psychology of players. Not all players enjoy the same types of content. I despise jumping puzzles, for instance. In fact, I’m not much of a “puzzle-solver” in general. I like action. I like a fast pace. Danger is a secondary consideration. If there’s enough action, I’ll put up with a lot of dying and armor repair, because to me it’s FUN.

I loved running champ farms, because they are fast paced. You can bounce around the map, it’s all action (fighting, special effects, flashy moves, YES!) The reward is an excellent side benefit. Don’t like the extra gold flowing into the game? Reduce the rewards, or lower the chance for reward, but PLEASE, don’t eliminate the Champion content from the maps!

I started an 8 champ farm on Gendarran Fields. Why? Because running the Queensdale farm was stupid. It’s a newb map. Listening to experienced players shout at newbs for being newbs was nonsense. Frostgorge had gotten too large. My connection isn’t as good, and I don’t have a lot of memory on my PC, so Way Pointing around the map means I start to lose out on all the action (not to mention any rewards).

I found that Gendarran Fields had 10 champs on it, so I started running it. It was such a great run that I began using it as a recruiting tool for my guild. I talk to players when I run. It’s my favorite part of the game. But now I’m relegated to being treated as if I’m a problem. This is highly insulting.

I paid $60 like anyone else, and I CREATED content – running it personally – and drew players into it. I’m happy to wait for players to run to a WP, or to explain anything about the game if someone asks a question. Yet, apparently, my behavior is a problem.

3. Mega-server/world-bosses/promises – If a guild member comes to a map I’m on, we’re almost never put on the same map. We must party up, then one of us must leave and come back to the map. This breaks a promise you guys made.

World boss events are worse, not better with “mega-server”. Take Ulgoth, for instance. I loved running that event chain. I have run that chain 3 times in a day before, because it’s just so much fun. I don’t even care that I can’t get the end reward every time. It doesn’t matter. It’s the best event in the entire game, and now I can only reach the Ulgoth at one specific time of night. Oh yeah, and now I have to deal with a zerg of 40+ players stomping their way across the map. That’s what you guys had in mind? This is fun?

Forget about grabbing the 3 chests along the way. No one has time for that nonsense in the zerg.

The steps taken to “handle problems” seem to create more problems than they solve. The solutions tend to be heavy-handed, brute force solutions. Whomever’s in charge of creating these solutions doesn’t seem to understand some basic things about human behavior and motivation.

You limit inventory to encourage us to purchase more, dump a ton of sellable items on us from mobs, and then punish us for trying to sell it off.

You reward us for killing champs, then decide you don’t like the fact that people are now killing champs.

You don’t like the zergs that form for champ farms, but create a system that specifically encourages giant zergs for world bosses.

You want people to run world boss content, but then artificially limit the content.

Who’s in charge, and where’s the logic? Where’s The Focus?

Champions should reward the same as any other PVE activity, for the time taken. I.e. More than a trash mob, and more than a vet, because they take longer, but no so much that people farm them exclusively.

Because of shared loot and zergs, this balance is razor thin – not enough loot and no one does them, which means it takes far too long to solo them, and some can’t be soloed at all. Too much loot and people dogpile them, which makes them too easy. Especially where there is a nearby uncontested waypoint.

If people are just farming champions and ignoring all other game content then there is an obvious effort/reward imbalance. Of course, if no one is doing champions, the same applies.

Agreed, Wanderer. For players like me, the excitement and action of champ farms and the Ulgoth event chain are about all that’s in the game for us. Everything else is localized, small-scale, slow (full of cut-scenes, talking, and going back and forth between NPCs).

I totally get why some think that customers like me wreck the game for others, but the key component is that I’m ALSO A CUSTOMER. I paid for this game, and in fact I’ve purchased a second license (for my son to play), as well as cash for in-game stuff.

So much of this game amounts to a chat-room-with-graphics. Now it feels more so to me.